Living Room of Satoshi wins Banking Industry "Startup Showdown"

A new bill paying cryptocurrency platform wins “Best Pitch” at the Technology & Innovation - The future of Digital Payments Conference recently held at the Sidney Hilton Hotel.

If you are over 50 years old you probably remember sitting at the kitchen table each monday writing and mailing checks to pay your bills. Bill paying has always been either tedious or expensive and is often both.

When this began to change with things like automatic bill payments and direct deposits, exorbitant fees and mistakes like overbilling started becoming commonplace. The Brisbane, Australia startup Living Room of Satoshi is looking to change this however. The new bill paying platform was voted as “Best Pitch” by attendees of the Technology & Innovation-the Future of Digital Payments Conference recently held at the Sidney Hilton Hotel in Australia.

The Living Room of Satoshi is a Bitcoin bill paying services that was launched in May of 2014. The service allows Australian residents to pay any BPay-enabled bill using Bitcoin although they are not affiliated with BPay. Users can pay anything such as credit card, utility and phone bills, school fees as well as taxes using the service and there are no fees for the customer.

Australian residents can pay any bill that has the BPAY logo and Biller Code. More than 19,000 businesses accept payment using BPAY, which is processed the next day if a user submits the BTC payment before 5pm on a Bank Business Day. “Living Room of Satoshi carries the burden of risk on any rate movements,” according to the company’s FAQ section.

Founders named the company after Satoshi Nakamoto in honor of the mysterious creator of the blockchain and have processed more than AUD$250,000 worth of bills for their clients since their launch just five months ago. The bill payment distribution can also be viewed for all users in the graphs presented where, ironically, almost 50% of users seem to be using Bitcoin to pay their credit card bills. Additionally, anyone can get an idea of what type of bills people are paying with Bitcoin in the Bills section.

The competition was comprised of four contestants who had to present their ideas, pitching their uniqueness and advantages within a certain period of time. The audience, which included representatives from the banking and payment industry was polled live to find the winner as Living Room of Satoshi received the most votes.

Co-founder and CTO Daniel Alexiuc said “Attendees reported that they were impressed with the live demo, highlighting the speed and ease of use of bitcoin bill payments. The funny cat video didn’t hurt our chances either.”

The other three contestants were Jeremy Lam, creator of Vennd a two way digital asset/cryptocurrency trading system, Jason Williams, Founder of BitPos, a next generation payments terminal and Nick Ross, Founder of Nano Transactions, which allows users to monetize digital content using “Nano Pay-per-View” charges.

Bitcoin was well represented at the conference this year. Along with the success of Living Room of Satoshi, other presentations from Bitcoin speakers such as Jason Williams, President of Bitcoin Australia were well receive and are available in both text and audio formats for anyone who was not able to attend. The audio is worth a listening just to hear Williams offer to explain about what a Ponzi scheme is to bankers who did not seem to know the definition.

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